The present invention relates to a method for operating pay stations of a customer identification (“ID”) based personnel and motor vehicle access control system in a post-payment scenario.
ID-based access control systems make use of the ID of a customer medium, wherein the ID of the customer medium is read by access control devices of the access control system and forwarded to a central server which, on the basis of the ID, allows or denies access via the access control device that communicates the ID. The customer medium may be realised as an RFID tag, as an RFID card, as a paper ticket with machine-readable information or as an electronic ticket with a one or two-dimensional barcode.
ID-based access control systems, in contrast to so-called “medium-based” access control systems, where access is allowed or denied by way of information stored on a medium without contacting a central server, have the advantage of ensuring high flexibility and scaling. An ID of a customer medium may have several types of access authorisation assigned to it, such as for different areas and different times and different operators. This flexibility is of advantage, in particular, in ski resorts. This is not straightforward with medium-based access control systems, however, since the storage capacity of a customer medium is limited so that storage of information relating to a number of access authorisations is not normally possible.
ID-based access control systems, on the other hand, have the disadvantage that the central server as well as the access control devices and the pay stations must be connected with each other via a network for the purpose of data communication. When an access control device, a pay station or the central server is offline, it is nevertheless necessary to ensure that the access control system continues to operate.
With ID-based access control systems with a post-payment scenario—i.e. access control systems where the respective fees have to be paid upon leaving the area covered by the access control system—all components must be online for the proper functioning of the system. For example, in order to calculate the fee to be paid, it is necessary to know the access history of a customer medium and to be in possession of a fee and tariff tables.
One way of ensuring that the access history of a customer medium is known, given the case that a pay station is offline, consists in the use of offline data records which are stored on the customer medium and which reflect the access history of the customer medium. To this end, however, the customer media used must all be able to be written to. Disadvantageously, many types of customer media are known which, as a rule, cannot be written to, such as credit cards, non-writable RFID tags or barcodes.